By Alpha Daramy Sesay and Aminata Allie
Information minister of the governing All Peoples Congress (APC) Ibrahim Ben Kargbo has catalogued his government’s successes in five years while making a case for their second term bid at their Youyi Building conference room in Freetown.
He said while there are challenges, the Koroma administration has improved on agriculture, health service delivery, education, infrastructure and energy as key areas that formed the basis of ‘The Agenda for Change’.
“The agenda for change is a structural programme aimed at identifying key areas of national development and to fast track those areas simply because they are very essential to the very sustenance of society,” he said.
However, Publicity Secretary of the opposition SLPP, Hon. Tamba Sam, has refuted the minister’s claims saying that the so-called ‘Agenda for Change’ was nothing but an “Agenda for Chop.”
“This government deserves nothing at all,” he chided, noting that “they must first of all take a closer look at the Wilkinson Road which is still very poor and the Kailahun/Kenema road which has not even reached a 5 per cent completion.”
In the area of healthcare, Hon. Sam said that they as an opposition are aware of a UNICEF report which shows that Sierra Leone still remains the worst in terms of maternal mortality because of the poor implementation of the free health care programme.
This poor health condition, he said, has led to cholera. “Everything about the government’s agenda for change is very poor.”
Meanwhile, on the relationship between the government and journalists, minister Kargbo said the days of journalists being beaten up by government officials were over, adding that “since we took up the mantle of leadership, no journalist has been beaten, molested, arrested or imprisoned.”
Contradicting the claim, vice president of the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists, Sheik Bawoh, said that “it is a lie, everybody knows that journalists are being beaten by not only members of the ruling government but also by those in the opposition.”
This, according to him, has happened several times. He highlighted both the state house saga and that of the national stadium.
As to whether no journalist has been jailed since the APC came into power, Bawoh said that “journalists are not meant to be jailed.” He added that the government made a lot of promises to journalists among them the FOI law and nothing has been done.
Again they promised to repeal the Public Order Act but they never did. “The government has done nothing to make us happy except sending some of our colleagues as press attachés abroad,” he closed.
His position was corroborated by Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai, the Executive Director of Society for Democratic Initiative, a rights based nongovernmental organisation that spearheaded the campaign for free speech and the FOI bill now in parliament.
“The relationship between the government and the media is not cosy,” he said and warned that the media must not be seen as having a rosy relationship with the government.
(c) Politico 02/10/12
